Douyin Pulls User-Made 'Suggestive' Gifts After Moderation Failure Floods Its Gift Store
Douyin rushed to remove user-made custom gifts of a sexually suggestive nature after a moderation failure let them flood its livestream gift store — a glitch that exposed how the platform's gift economy really works.
Douyin, China's largest short-video platform, spent Wednesday rushing to pull a wave of user-made virtual gifts after its livestream gift store was flooded with crude, sexually suggestive animations — the result, users worked out, of a moderation hole rather than a official redesign.
The trouble surfaced when viewers noticed the "custom gift" section of Douyin's gift plaza — a feature that lets users submit their own animated gifts for others to buy and send during livestreams — filling up with items whose names leave little to translation: one ranked list carried gifts with names like "the streamer is gay" and various phallic references, each priced at one diamond, the platform's cheapest unit. Others noted an animation of an orange and a cucumber that bounced across the lower half of the host's screen.
Weibo's reaction moved through disbelief to jokes within the hour. "Has Douyin been hacked???" asked one user in a post liked more than 6,000 times. Another diagnosed the mechanics: "Douyin had a bug today — the review process simply wasn't looking at custom gifts, and it was all that crude stuff." The joke at the moderation team's expense wrote itself: how, one post asked, did gifts like these clear review at a platform this size — "was the reviewer asleep at their desk?"
By evening the offending gifts were gone. Users reported that the custom-gift submissions caught in the flood had been removed, with several accounts saying the feature itself had been suspended while the platform cleaned up. Douyin did not issue a public statement on the episode, and its usual governance channels — the monthly platform-rule announcements that catalogue removed content — have so far said nothing about it.
The episode touched a nerve because virtual gifts are not a fringe feature — they are the business model. On Douyin and across Chinese livestreaming, viewers buy diamonds and convert them into animated gifts, some costing thousands of yuan, that shower the host on screen; hosts and their talent agencies take a cut. The gift economy has made livestreaming one of the few reliable ways to earn a living in China's creator economy, and it is also the reason platforms tolerate a long grey tail of suggestive content: the boundary between charming and explicit is exactly where tipping spikes.
That tension is why users greeted the cleanup with scepticism rather than relief. "Douyin has plenty of beautiful gifts with gorgeous effects," one post that gathered hundreds of likes began — "I don't understand why they'd put out things this crude. And that orange and cucumber one even had its own entrance animation, popping up right in the middle of the screen." Commentators framed the incident as exposing an audit shortfall rather than one bad day, with one noting that governance of the livestream gift economy "still has a long way to go." The custom-gift feature invited users to design the merchandise itself; on the evidence of this week, the review queue never got the memo.